I reraise the old school collection of questions in a shorter list:
- The Role of Women In The Church, hence the question of whether they can be enfranchised.
- The Role of Race, hence the question of 'integration'
I can appreciate that for those people for whom the current military like operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, et al, this is a whole new world to them. But for those of us who knew the arguments about the role of women and of race, as very active issues up through the 1990's, it is not for light and transient reasons that we present the core problem of whether or not we are really planning on actually addressing the question of "american chritianity", or merely embarking upon mere "liberal bashing".
For those who may not be well versed in the Actual American History, they would clearly want to return to the 1960 Presidential Election Cycle, and with it the core problems of whether america would still be America IF we elected a Papist to the Position of President. I can and do appreciate that we could similarly adopt the question vis-a-vis the Mormans, since in many sections of America, they are considered as a Dangerous Cult, at least on Par with the Roman Catholic Church.
So I can, and do appreciate that in a History Free World, one where we might as well assert that we are at war with the Iranian Flying Saucers, since the need to correlate any current action with any prior argument is no longer required. In the current free standing world, there is clearly no need to worry about any of the actual american history, since, as we all know, anything from the time before all things changed, is, well, Evil Liberalism.
So do americans really want to address the problems of what is Orthodox Christianity? Or do they really want to hope that majikally they can retreat to some time before, when america was more like some image of america that they would have preferred it to have been, you know, back before the evil liberals destroyed everything. You know, gave women the right to vote, allowed negros, roman catholics, and jews, to be considered the same sort of people as the rest of the real americans....
So that I am clear here. I am talking about Actual Biblically Literal Postions that were Biblically Literally The Word Of God, not those liberal policy position.
So please, do we really want to deal with the "god" question - or is the real horror here that we live in that pathetic era in which, just as HanoiAnnieCoulter turned the term Treason from being a legally meaningful term into a mere euphenism for "I do not like you and wish that my daddy would have bought me a husband rather than waste all that money on a College Education"? Do we really want her current whinefestival to be the new standard that she really wished that God would have made her a man, so that she could be a meaningful person.
I can and do appreciate that most americans remain unclear about how, and/or why, they wish to deal with the problems of their nation being somewhat at war, and that we should be doing all of the patriotic stuff.... but this too is not my first time through the Kultur Kampf. Now, more than ever, americans may want to work out whom they are really at war with, and how do they want to do that War Thing. Can they majikally bifurcate out their 'religious' part of that process? Can they simply skip over the flow of their american history????
So who knows, some day, americans may decide that they can really work out if they want to reallly run an effective Kultur Kampf. If they do, who will be doing the deciding about who gets to get out of the Kamps.